Startup investment: This is what Visionaries Club investors pay attention to

As you might expect from the founders of a visionaries club, Amorelie founder Sebastian Pollok and La Famiglia founder Robert Lacher had a pretty clear vision when they founded the Visionaries Club as a VC firm in Berlin in 2019: they wanted to invest money in startups , who made B2B software with which old industries and medium-sized businesses in particular could be digitized.

This still applies today: The Visionaries Fund is particularly interesting for B2B SaaS company startups. The second generation of funds was launched in September 2022, with 400 million euros, divided into three pots: 150 million euros for early-stage tech companies (seed funds), 200 million euros for growth companies (early growth stage). With the remaining 50 million, the investors started the Visionaries Tomorrow Fund for deeptech startups – and also hardware.

Read too

Renewable energy: 5 startups that you should definitely keep on your radar – says an investor

Absolute basic requirement: There must be a problem

Robert Jäckle has been a partner at the Visionaries Club since March 2024 and works primarily for the B2B fund. And this has been the case since shortly after the first fund was founded: After studying at Oxford, Jäckle, who originally comes from the Frankfurt area, came to Berlin and immersed himself in the startup scene with his first job at Heycar. “Always in focus: I actually want to start something of my own.” That’s where he met Sebastian Pollok, who eventually brought him to the newly founded venture capitalist Visionaries Club.

The central question behind all of his investments, explains Jäckle, is: Does the startup that we are supposed to finance here deliver directly usable software that can be used in the real world of work in medium-sized companies or in industries that have not yet been digitized? Or simply put: Is there a problem that this startup will solve? So: A real, big problem? Isn’t the startup’s offer just a “nice to have”? The exchange with the industry side, i.e. the potential customers of the startups from its portfolio, is therefore key and basically comes before the pitches from the young companies. “We want to know: Where are the problems, what makes you inefficient? And then we look for software that solves that.”